By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - An Independent Graphic Designer living in a city that was built upon an ancient Unicorn burial ground.

28 August 2009

[design] Paste Into – The "Other" Paste Command In Photoshop

2200.The joy of Photoshop is that it has more features than you can shake a stick at. That's also the heartbreak, because there are so many it's easy to forget ones you would find mad useful. And one of those is Paste Into.

It's an advanced version of the Paste command, which you can find in the Edit pulldown just underneath the Paste command. The reason it's awesome is that it saves you a ton of steps if you want to paste an object into a certain area.

What Paste Into does is this: given a selection (which you can create any which way you want), it pastes the copied image data into the current document on a new layer, and then creates a layer mask with the same shape as the selection. The effect is that your pasted content appears to be pasted into the selected area – the layer mask – which can then be gradiated, changed, whatever you want to happen.

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This Here Blogger

Graphic designer, writer, editor. Worker in the Big Machine; the quintessential working-class native Oregonian, I drive some of the grimier gears so the Big Cats and Kittens don't have to. Am in the process of reinventing myself as the artist I always ought to have been. My blog is The ZehnKatzen Times.

This sentence, courtesy of commenter "JD", will help you remember the initials in order:All Across Portland Our Streets Wind Around Mossy Yards. Traffic Snarls May Mean Jammed Cars, Cranky Motorists Making Minimal Headway. Harried Commuters Just Love Going Slow.

Commenter Dave DiNucci, using enough of the letters from each word to eliminate ambiguity, gives us the following two possiblilities: This first one plays on the fact that alphabetically-arranged streets going north from Burnside are named for Portland founders while those going south do not:ANcestors ASsociated Portland Oregon STreets With ALphabetic MORtals, Yet Toward SAlem, MAInly MADe JEjune, COLUmnar, CLiche MARked MIxtures. MONotones HARmonize HALfway, COLLiding JAuntily. Lines Gently SHim.

This second one is more poetic but less PDX-centered, but works the Gorge in, as well as Lincoln, Grant, and Sheridan: